Committee Meeting - November 27, 2014

Darren Bondy
Secretary to the Committee
November 27, 2014

Present: 

Dave Wallace (Chair), Darren Bondy (Secretary), Bruce Campbell, Marko Dumancic, Erick Engelke, Bob Hicks, Bill Ince, Dawn Keenan, Robyn Landers, Paul Miskovsky, Carl Nagel, Terry Stewart, Jason Testart

Guests:

Nancy Pariag, Adam Wlad

Regrets:

Andrea Chappell, Dave Kibble, Sati Singh

Agenda

7. Next CTSC Meeting

[Will be held Thursday, December 11, 2014, at 1:30 p.m., in MC 2018A.]

Quest Mobile

Nancy Pariag and Adam Wlad provided a status update for Quest Mobile. Topics included:

• What is Quest Mobile?
• What are the benefits for students?
• What is the impact on students?
• Sample Quest mobile pages
• Student feedback

Comments & discussion

• Will Quest Mobile be accessible with a Window’s phone?
  • We have not tested it on a Windows phone at this time.
  • The vendor does support Windows based devices.
• The project was started on April 23^rd and consists of members of the Grad Office, the Registrar’s Office and IST.
• Quest Mobile is capable of doing both inquiry and transactional pages, unlike other universities that only launched it with inquiry pages.
• When accessing Quest it will detect if you are on a mobile device and direct you to the mobile version.
  • At this time this is only for when current students access Quest; will eventually involve applicants.
• Quest Mobile does not handle certain functions that the main Quest site has such as pre-enrolment for classes, student awards, transcripts or anything to do with finances; these features will be part of future phases. 
• One of the biggest challenges of this project was working with the navigation from the desktop site. There is no navigation on the desktop site so we had to do a lot of work on that for the mobile version.
• Next steps:
  • Quest Mobile to be back in production soon, after going through an initial launch and then a final assessment as part of the recent review of the Quest.
  • Will be looking at the applicant experience and improvements to the class schedule/calendar.

View the full presentation on Quest Mobile.

Chair’s Remarks

• The ad hoc Committee on Technological Innovation had its first meeting.
  • Thorsten Heins was elected as the chair. We will be giving him a demonstration on the Student Portal and D2L etc.

pocketNexus demonstration (Erick Engelke)

Erick Engelke demonstrated an application called pocketNexus. Topics included:

• Challenge
• Solutions to date
• Demonstration of pages

View the full presentation on pocketNexus.

Comments and discussion

• Can it be set up to save your last session? To bring up your drive letters, printers added etc. so you do not have to search for those things every time you login?
  • Will need to look into this.
• You need to VPN in outside of pocketNexus.
• The only aspect that is Engineering specific is the Research (R) drive; it should be fairly easy to make use of this elsewhere.
• It is intended to run on laptops (Macs and Windows – not Linux).

IST Hardware Repair

From Bruce Campbell’s email to CTSC members on November 7^th:

The IST hardware shop will now only do repairs for DTR machines (purchased through our vendor), plus HP printers. 

For equipment repair, please start the process by submitting an RT.   Clients are expected to drop off smaller items (laptops, notebooks, etc) at the IST Service Desk in MC 1052 (in January this will be moving to EC2).   For large items (e.g. printers) IST will make arrangements to either repair in the field, or pick the equipment up.

All repairs for student owned equipment are directed to Campus Tech or outside repair shops.

IST will handle repair of Lenovo equipment purchased through DTR, if we have experience with the equipment.   Otherwise Lenovo repairs are directed to Campus Tech.

All other repairs are directed to Campus Tech

• CHIP will be moving on November 28^th to EC2: services at the DC library will be increased.
• Hardware repair will be done in EC2, exam scanning will remain in the MC building until January.
• IST will continue to have access to MC2018A & B for the time being; as well as equipment loans and the training rooms.
• Members have expressed some interest in getting a tour of EC2.

Roundtable Reporting

Arts (Dawn Keenan)

• Moving our labs to a System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) over the exam period.
• Re: uPrint issue reported at last meeting; apparently had to with photocopying on the same printers. Retail Services will be disabling the photocopying function on all uPrint printers we have.  

Client Services, IST (Bob Hicks)

• Training labs will remain in MC as well as MC2009.
• We have rolled out Microsoft 2013; we have been directing people to Lynda.com for training. If there seems to be a need for some more formal training or a course, we could look into providing something.

Library (Carl Nagel)

• The RFP for Desktop Virtualization closed over a week ago; in the midst of scoring the proposals now.
• We have done up a Memorandum of Agreement with the Federation of students revolving around a NetApp in our server room and they are providing us with some disaster recovery.
• A Hearing Aid Society consultant come in and looked at our meeting rooms and service areas to provide accessibility advice.  

Computer Science (Bill Ince)

• We are still working on some flood repair.
• Planning to have the non-research servers behind the Firewall soon but research servers will take some time still.
• We still have NetApp problems with performance; we need a decent analysis of why it’s so slow.
  • Campbell suggested to contact Jason Gorrie for advice on this issue.

Science (Paul Miskovsky)

• eValuate is currently running for this term; thousands of surveys being done.
• We experienced a couple issues with OAT recently; it was shut down inadvertently overnight.
• There used to be a Student Accountability system that tracked student illnesses; we re-wrote it and it will be used again starting in January.
• We have been working with Bruce Campbell to move all of our Virtual Machines (VMs) over to IST.

Math (Robyn Landers)

• We began moving our servers behind the firewall last week; everything seems to be working fine, we are currently surveying our users to see if they are running anything that requires special treatment.
• Announced several months ago that the @math mailservices will be shut down.

Engineering (Erick Engelke)

• There have been 4 fires in workstations in the past year; appears to be caused by ATA to SATA convertors. If you have any workstations with these converters it is recommended that you switch.
• Working with IST on moving things behind the firewall; it is a work in progress.

Updates (various) via email

IT Security

• Will bring Mike Patterson in to discuss Symantec End Point Protection at a future meeting.

Next meeting

The next meeting will be held on December 11, 2014 at 1:30pm, in MC 2018A.